I visited Professors Steve Fickas and Stuart Faulk at the University Oregon. The purpose of the visit was to find out about their group's current work.

Steve's recent interest is in the requirements for the new open software development processes such as the Linux developments. These software products are developed without using the traditional software processes. The groups are geographically dispersed, perhaps never meeting in person. The requirements and specifications for products are somehow evolved by consensus. These groups have developed a number of interesting tools, including configuration management. Steve is interested in understanding and documenting the processes of these successful groups. We also talked about a number of other issues. My group's recent work on the visualization of software release histories may be relevant as a nontraditional tool that could be used in these processes. Also, my group's work on mobile agents (http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/Staff/lux/Gypsy/) and push systems (http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/Staff/pooh/Minstrel/) may be relevant here and we will be in contact to explore some sort of cooperation in the future.

Stuart Faulk told me about his work on developing a curriculum for a Master's degree in software engineering. It is a program aimed at working engineers (www.omse.org). It is an excellent program based on the notion of teaching context engineering fundamentals in context. The context sets some of the important requirements for software engineering. I also saw a copy of Stuart's 1996 tutorial paper on software requirements from the IEEE Tutorial Notes on Software Engineering. I recommend it as a highly readable tutorial and mini-survey of the field.

My thanks to Steve and Stuart for their warm hospitality.